After Dark, by Haruki Murakami

ELLE
May 2007

From the prodigious imagination and prolific pen of Haruki Murakami (Kafka on the Shore, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) comes a metaphysical mystery that's surprisingly linear in structure and almost tidy for his oeuvre. In After Dark (Knopf), Murakami is, as always, obsessed with the semipermeable membrane separating reality from surreality, but he tells this mesmerizing tale in a way that should take his passionate hipster fans only one read (maybe two) to fully comprehend.

We are assigned the alternating perspectives of a "high-flying night bird" and a "midair camera," peering in on two sisters one night from just before midnight to just before dawn. Mari Asai, like many Murakami characters, is an alienated young loner on a quest that she has yet to articulate even to herself. Her gorgeous older sister, Eri, has been asleep for two months, and the exasperated Mari can no longer stand to be under the same roof with her. Stealing away to downtown Tokyo, Mari encounters the inhabitants of the deep night, including an amateur musician, the owner of a "love hotel," a sadistic salaryman, a battered prostitute, Chinese gangsters, and a couple of runaways. Each brings Mari closer to understanding her Sleeping Beauty sister's fate and what role Mari is playing in it. With Murakamian touches such as a chilling "Man With No Face" and a series of overlap-ping coincidences, After Dark deftly explores -existentialist notions of purpose, control, and identity.